Racial Concerns and Womanist Disruptions in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

The struggle of a black feminist writer is to fight for her community as well as fight with her community. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple attempts to navigate this fine balance. In the process she invokes the many threads that constitute everyday black lives- racism, religion, economic imperatives, gendered expectations, black homes, childhood, humor, speech patterns, fashion et al. The paper attempts to examine these and more specifically the new gender horizons that the text indicates as a possibility. The various female characters in the text negotiate their prescribed status within the community variously. Some like Celie’s mother and Harpo’s mother practically die in the harness. Some like Sofia are shown contesting the racial and gendered configurations throughout the text at tremendous personal cost. Shug on the other hand, exhibits an electrifying defiance towards the gender norms of the community. The paper examines if Walker is able to deliver a more equitable world for black women or if the promise of a new world is merely a carnivalesque one. The paper examines how the ‘reformation’ of the male characters and the subsequent reclaiming of the black community that the text ends on constitute a kind of back tracking on important gender concerns that the text had committed itself to earlier.